Pairwise’s Fulcrum™ Platform creates custom gene editing tools will help accelerate innovation in agricultural product portfolios, supply chains, and production systems.
Pairwise, a health-focused food and agriculture company, launched its FulcrumTM Platform today. Using proprietary CRISPR technology along with custom gene editing tools, Pairwise will be able to make complex changes to plant genetics quickly and successfully, leading to innovative enterprise-scale applications. With this game-changing platform approach, Pairwise applies it to both its own ConsciousTM Foods brand and to the products of its business partners. Pairwise is among the first companies in the world to commercialize food developed using CRISPR gene editing technology.
“With the Fulcrum platform, we can make small genetic changes that deliver big product impacts. We call this approach the Seismic Tweak,” said Ian Miller, Chief Development Officer at Pairwise.
In May 2023, Pairwise launched its first branded product, Conscious™ Greens, in the food service channel through a partnership with Performance Food Group. Additionally, via a five-year partnership with Bayer, Pairwise used the Fulcrum platform to identify nearly 200 unique gene sequences that can be changed to improve productivity and disease resistance across a variety of row crops, including a unique target in corn that has increased kernel rows by up to 20%.
Pairwise unique CRISPR intellectual property (IP), enables the company to edit genes more effectively than other companies in the market, helping it evolve to become an industry-leading tool. Novel Pairwise-developed technologies that underpin the Fulcrum platform include REDRAW™, or RNA-encoded DNA replacement of alleles with CRISPR, a precise templated editing toolbox that can make any type of small edit at CRISPR-targeted sites. Another tool is SHARC™, a proprietary enzyme that works well for cutting, base editing, and REDRAW editing. This is a combination that’s created a foundational, game-changing genome editing toolkit.
SHARC, REDRAW, and Pairwise’s other proprietary base-editing tools allow for precise changes at virtually any location in a genome, an approach that holds huge potential not only in agriculture but in other fields as well, such as medicine. Anchored by the Fulcrum Platform and the company’s deep technical and agronomic expertise in over 60 crops, Pairwise is leading the way in genetics-based innovation in plants and plant-based systems.